IN these tough financial times, women make better bosses according to a study of workers.

The research covering workers in more than 20 occupations, from firefighting to accountancy concludes that men are far more likely to take risks than their female counterparts.

Staff say that the females are much more prudent and cautious in their long-term decision-making.

Occupational psychologists Geoff Trickey and So Yi Yeung suggest that its genetic and men are programmed from birth to be what they call impulsive, adventurous and carefree.

And we all know where being impulsive, adventurous, carefree and, above all, risky, got all those City gents, dont we?

Our banks down the swanee and the deepest recession since the 30s, that's where.

And I don't think any woman would have got off with behaving like RBS's Fred The Shred Goodwin, who not only took risk to an entirely new level but treated his employees with contempt and little respect, barely noticing them unless they committed the cardinal sin of serving him pink biscuits.

The psychologists are not the first to suggest that women are better suited to managing businesses, especially when the financial chips are down.

Christine Lagarde, the super-smart, super-chic former French finance minister, now boss of the International Monetary Fund, once said that if Lehman Brothers the US bank whose fall in September 2008 precipitated the economic disaster which engulfed us all had been the Lehman Sisters, they would very probably have survived.

But its not only in the financial sector where being female is better for business.

A survey for Vodafone last year indicated that when a woman is in charge, shes likely to get more out of her staff because she understands they have a life beyond the office.

She is more understanding about, for instance, someone having to take time off for a child's dental appointment.

None of that, of course, prevents people from believing that female bosses are red in tooth and claw.

They are seen as devious, bitchy and ruthless Queen Bees who pull the promotion ladder smartly up behind them.

Maybe these misconceptions prevent women from getting down and dirty with the boys in the boardroom or making it to the top of other professions.

Perhaps that caution of which the psychologists speak stops them from putting themselves forward and taking the almost inevitable flak.

Or they're too prudent to think the key to the executive loo is the be-all and end-all.

Nor do they, unlike most men, have that priceless asset, a wife to keep the home fires burning.

But despite that, the times are definitely a-changing. Almost 100 more women were appointed to the boards of the UK's top companies last year with the proportion of directors up from 12.5 per cent in 2010 to nearly 15 per cent.

Perhaps because others have come to the same conclusion as the psychologists, that in the current economic conditions, the leadership style of women IS more effective.

But are they always as good as Trickey and Yeung would have us believe? And do they help other women into the boardroom or keep their fellow girls on the shop floor?

It was noticeable Margaret Thatcher only allowed one woman to serve in her Cabinet.

But at least no one ever suggested, as yet another myth about women bosses has it, that the Lady slept her way to the top.